The Collective Memory: Archives and Libraries as Heritage

Abstract

When the Royal Society of Canada in association with Heritage Canada planned the symposium "Preserving the Canadian Heritage" in 1975, it was necessary for archivists to make a special request that archives be accorded a separate presentation.The Dominion Archivist emphasized in his address the tendency to link heritage to "buildings, historic sites, artifacts and pictorial art.This in itself is a rich inheritance, but if this were all, the past would be an enigma to us as it was to early man before the invention of writing."'Visually unremarkable, voluminous in quantity, and hidden away in boxes, archives have generally been taken for granted as the information environment of traditional heritage, a collective memory to be ransacked by experts when some element of the past is to be fixed in time and space. 1 Wilfred 1. Smith, "Archives as the Recorded Past" in Preserving the Canadian Heritage (Ottawa, The Royal Society of Canada, 1975).p. 107.

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